


Happiness and Lasting Pain

by Erring_and_umming



Category: Being Human (UK)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, F/M, Post-Season/Series 05 Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:21:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25031632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erring_and_umming/pseuds/Erring_and_umming
Summary: Set after the infamous extra scene of series 5.Hal, Alex and Tom rush back to the house after the events in the restaurant. They know that the world around them is a lie by the Devil to keep them docile and away from his treasured apocalypse. How do they reconcile their humanity now that they have to abandon it?
Relationships: Alex Millar/Hal Yorke
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	Happiness and Lasting Pain

**Author's Note:**

> I hurt my feelings with this fic.

**Alex**

_“This horror will grow mild, this darkness light.”_

**_X_ **

They sat in the dark, the shadows had grown around them as the sun kissed the horizon goodnight, bathing them in the sliver glow of fullness of the moon. They dare not move; they dare not break the spell that had been cast over them. She knew one of them had to speak, she could feel her bones jittering inside her and her nerves build into a knot in her chest as she stared at _her boys._

Was it wrong to call them that?

They were hers and she was theirs. They were meant to protect eachother from the storms that brewed around them, that boiled the sky.

The pale planes of Hal’s face were cut in shadow that laid across his cheekbones in swathes of gossamer and a frown puckered at his lips. He was barely in the room with them, cocooned in distant memories that played within his eyes, dancing just out of her understanding.

He was beautiful.

Tom was awash in the light, he kept his eyes trained upon the moon, still bewitched by the glow but no longer enslaved to the whispers of the change. A sea grew in his eyes, wavering along the waterline and his mouth was downturned.

“You’ll have to do it.” Hal whispered. They both knew what he meant.

It was such a soft caress of words upon her ears she was sure she had imagined it.

“We have to go back. So, you’ll have to do it.” His words were frost, chilling her to the bone, racing through her veins.

“There’s gotta be anotha way.” Tom insisted, his hands fisting upon the table, the rivers ran down his face now, “We could use the chair!” he said in desperation as the little crystals fell into his lap and his lip trembled. Sometimes she forgot how young he was. 

“It would be for naught Tom…we thought—I thought it was possible to break the cycles, but I think it is much like you’re wolf in many ways. To cage it so long…I don’t think I could do it again. The detox I mean, I killed eight people,” the both winced as he ploughed on without a waver in his voice, “It would take the better part of a year for me to go dry and…I am craven.”

“So, we could do it. The year, we could help ya!” Tom begged.

Hal stared ahead, “And if he didn’t leave? Would you keep him in the chair for 50 years? Would you die waiting for me Tom, use your lifetime on me, for the man who has lived so many of them?

“But then what if Good Hal came back? You get your friend, the man that I am not, but he has these memories, of a time when blood held nothing for him. Where his mind was not torn asunder, and he was allowed to _feel._ Do you expect that he would be able to look at either of you without shame tearing at him? Because you would miss me, _the human_ you would not want…the leech _._ Do you think he would be able to keep to his routines; do you think he would be able to lo—” his mouth shut with a click; eyes wide and despairing, as if he was begging them to understand. 

But she kept silent; she could not speak for fear that she would sob.

“There isn’t another way.” It was louder, insistent. There he was, the man she loved to the point of aching, but he was detached —a ghost upon their peripheries. Sometimes he was so harsh she wondered if a person such as he could be made from steel. His teeth were set and the muscles in his jaw jumped, “I—I assume we have to…wake up somehow.”

Waking up sounded like the wickedest of the Devil’s torments.

**Tom**

_“Our cure, to be no more; sad cure!”_

**_X_ **

“How do you suppose we go ‘bout doing that Hal?” he bit out. He did not mean to say it with such venom, but denial stewed in his belly and his innards writhed like snakes. How could they sit there? How could Alex say nothing?

Hal still didn’t meet their eyes, but his lip trembled; he had seen that only thrice upon Hal. Once in a little pawnshop, a stake pressed into his heart and the memories of an old man floating before him. The second, in the throes of detox, when he had begged for death’s kiss, for release from the self-inflicted torture. The third, when he held the corpse of Natasha, when he had asked Tom to kill him, smeared in blood and none of it his.

The mask was slipping again.

“I assume we have to forcibly remove ourselves from the dream. The Devil holds us here so we must acknowledge the curses he took from us. Iron, silver and a stake to the heart,” It was clinical and precise, the way he spoke as if he were reading the news or describing the latest broadcast of _You and Yours._

Alex finally spoke, asking weakly, “We off ourselves?”

“Essentially.”

“Wot ‘appens when we go back?” he couldn’t help but ask, the words spilled out of him selfish in their need to be heard, to fill the room with the poison.

“We…” Hal sighed, he finally looked at him and it was fathomlessly sad, “We revert. Go back to what we once were, and we defeat the bastard. Then you and Alex…”

“Kill ya.” Tom hiccupped; they had just gotten Hal back. They had struggled and clawed their way back through the threshold of friendship. They had mourned the loss of their lives, they had comforted eachother when they awoke from the clutches of a nightmare. They had dug their heels in and begged the universe to keep them together.

“Yes.” Hal nodded robotically; Alex was breathing hard as if each intake burned her. Tom’s eyes flicked to her stricken face that was tracked with tears of black-mascara lacework from her eyelashes to her neck.

“An’ you’re okay wif that?”

A tear meandered down Hal’s face, unhurried and treacherous in it’s descent to his chin, “No Tom. To be honest I have grown quite…quite fond of you two and I-I’m not ready to leave you yet but…” Hal smiled weak, wet and dejected, “Needs must.”

“I won’t do it.” He knew he would. Deep in the pit of himself he knew that he could. That the man, the vampire, Hal became could not be allowed to scourge itself upon the earth.

“You will.”

He couldn’t, he wouldn’t talk about this. Not now, “We can talk about this in tha morn Hal.” He found himself saying, the words flowing like water, “I’m goin’ ta bed.”

Swirling ash filled his vision as he walked away, and he knew a blazing world awaited him in his bed. Filled with debased creatures in human shapes and teeth of knives that flay him to the nerve and there **he** would be—grinning.

**Hal**

_“Farewell happy fields,_ _  
Where joy forever dwells: Hail, horrors, hail.”_

**X**

Hal watched Tom’s retreating back, consumed by the shadows of the hallway and his heavy footfalls broke the silence of the night.

He could hear Alex breathing, that constant little aide-mémoire of _life,_ untainted and full, that shushed from her lips.

“Come here.” He whispered and opened his arms, the warmth of her diffused from her skin as she tucked herself into his embrace.

“I-I don’t want to go Hal.” She sobbed, each utterance wracked her body, and he held her like he would a child in need of comfort. 

“I know.” He didn’t either.

“I don’t want to be a ghost.” Neither did he.

“I know.”

He just held her, until her cries faded into little sighs and his shoulder was damp with her tears, but the tremors still held her. Her fingers trembled as she mapped her fingertips across his face, skating across his cheeks and nose. He closed his eyes and she kissed his eyelids, feather-light and delicate.

“I love you,” he said into the darkness of his eyelids, each word a prayer.

“I love you too.” She said from the blackness, each word gospel.

He was holding onto her, to them, by his fingertips and the abyss waited below, hungry and ready to swallow him whole, “Can I tell you something?” he asked, opening his eyes. She was there, solid and warm and whole with him.

“Anything,” she breathed, clasping him close as if he were already smoke.

He paused for a moment, enraptured by her loveliness, but the dam was cracking under the weight of her awaiting stare—he fractured. “I-I don’t want to die Alex,” he choked, tears falling in earnest, “I thought I had seen everything, _been_ everyone, done _everything_ that there would be nothing the world could show me. But _here_ I have had—I…you have been the greatest blessing, the most astonishing woman who I did, do not and will continue to not deserve and I’m so…I’m so scared Alex, but I want—I want you to remember me now. The man I become, he is horrific, but he is _me._ Please, I do not deserve it, but when you think of me, think of the _human,_ the man who loves you most ardently.”

“Oh Hal.”

The kiss was slow, like slipping into the waters of a warm bath, they didn’t rush for time could not hold them here. They only held eachother, hands insistent and Hal found his in her hair, running his fingers through the softness of the locks, down her neck to feel the hypnotic thrumming of her heart. She did the same and they were twinned in their humanity. 

He pulled away, staring into the jade pools before him.

“Do you think…do you think we’ll see eachother again? After it’s all over I mean." She asked, her fingers drawing swirls into the skin of his neck.

“There is no afterlife for vampires Alex.” 

**X**

_“Confounded, though immortal._

_But his doom, reserved him to more wrath; for now_

_the thought both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently I don't believe in happy endings. 
> 
> (All quotes from Milton's 'Paradise Lost')


End file.
